Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“Where’d you learn to talk, jackass?”

Leon arched his eyebrows and lifted his chin, striking an aspect of great dignity. “The theatre .”

“Lemme see your license and registration.”

“Certainly, Officer.” Leon rifled through his pockets for a wallet. As he did, the police officer trained a suspicious eye on me.

“You know the registration on your plates is out of date.”

“That is because this automobile does not, in fact, belong to me. If it did, I would have surely exercised enough forethought to remember to reregister it at the proper time. As it is, this car belongs to my former wife, and I am sure you are all-too-well familiar with a certain negligence in such practical matters that is characteristic of the fair sex.”

“What, like letting your damn car run outta gas on the Hutch?”

“Pish, Officer. I am only human.”

“Hey, we might run this shit after all,” mused the cameraman.

Leon handed him his driver’s license. The policeman read it under his flashlight. He looked up.

“You been drinking at all?”

“Nay, sir, not a drop.”

This could not have possibly been one hundred percent true, I thought. I wanted to say, “Why, thy lips are scarce wiped since thou drank’st last,” but I checked my tongue, considering the circumstances.

I saw the moon, tinted orange, rising above the trees like an orb of burning blood suspended on a wire before the velvety curtain of night.

“I think your buddy back there’s a little sick,” said the officer. The cameraman audibly suppressed a guffaw. “You oughta take care of him.”

“He’s recently had an operation. I was transporting him safely home, whereupon the car became suddenly and completely unexpectedly depleted of fuel.”

“Tell your ex-wife to reregister her car. It’s a month past expiration. We stopped to take a look ’cause it looked like a suspicious vehicle.”

The police officer gave Leon his driver’s license back, and the two men got back in their car and drove away. My brain was still sodden with anesthesia. I did not fall back asleep, but mumbled and gurgled to myself in the backseat, watching the shadow play created by the car passing under the streetlights lining the parkway, and listening to the traffic in the other lane whooshing past us. I felt simultaneously chilled and relaxed. I imagined I was in a spaceship, blasting away from the earth and into the cold black vacuum of space at a velocity close to the speed of light, so that time dilates and millions of years go by, and one day I crash-land on an alien planet populated by a hostile race of talking hairless upright apes, only to discover to my horror that this is really earth. I felt a great surge of affection for Leon, in spite of his appalling incompetence. He had let his ex-wife’s Wagoneer run out of gas on the parkway, then left me asleep and drugged in back of his car in the middle of the night as he hobbled down the shoulder in search of a gas station. Yet I felt no anger, no resentment, toward him. He was my friend. I felt my organs sloshing around inside my little body with every turn, every slight shift of centripetal force. Leon had the radio on, very softly, so as not to disturb me, and I think he had it tuned to an “oldies” station, which was playing a Roy Orbison song: only the lonely… know the way I… feel tonight … And I listened to Roy Orbison’s angelic falsetto mournfully cooing that bittersweet threnody to his loneliness into the rush and howl of a cold dark night on the Hutchinson River Parkway.

Soon Leon was easing the car off the highway and onto the small winding roads that led us through Pelham Bay Park, across the mint-green bridge and back to City Island. I looked out the window as we were shuddering across the bridge that took us home, and I saw the giant neon-red lobster, doomed — doomed like someone in Greek mythology is doomed in Hades to endlessly repeat some futile task — to forever repeatedly open and close his claw. His red light was reflected in the black and wobbling waters beneath him. Leon parked the car and helped me out. I tried to walk, but I could not. The earth kept pitching and shifting under my feet; it was like trying to walk on the bottom of the ocean. Leon held my hand to support me, but it was obvious to both of us after a few of my unsteady steps that autonomous locomotion was still impossible for me, and the only way I would make it back to the apartment unaided would have been to crawl there. So Leon scooped the still-delirious me up in his big squishy arms and hoisted me up, and I clambered onto his shoulders and sat on them, just as we would do while performing Shakespeare in the subway stations. And I held on as tightly as I could. And I clung to him, riding on Leon’s shoulders, my face swaddled in surgical gauze, as he inched his mass fastidiously down the sidewalk, walking under the lurid orange lights, under an urban night sky, orange and starless.

We passed Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, long since closed up and dark by now, around the corner, past the dumpsters by the kitchen door, and opened the door to our apartment, and Leon carried me inside, reminding me to duck beneath the doorway. He took me into the apartment without snapping on any lights that would have disturbed my retinas with their unwanted brightness, guiding himself only by his intimate knowledge of the space. He laid me supine on my bed, the futon in the living room. It wasn’t made. Leon tucked me in. I clutched the blankets and fell asleep almost immediately: my eyes shut, and I returned to oblivion like a weary traveler finally returning home, mumbling Lydia’s name until it dissolved into nonsense syllables and disappeared into silence.

When I woke up the next day it was the afternoon and my head felt hot and my skull was throbbing fuzzily with a headache. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, at my gauze-wrapped head, felt my face flaming with postoperative pain, and felt with my hand the new protrusion in the middle of my face where my nose was, hidden underneath the bandages.

“The doctor informed me you’re not to remove the bandages for six days,” said Leon over breakfast, rattling the pages of the New York Times he had purchased that morning when he had left the apartment to buy donuts. He had purchased two dozen donuts at a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away, and had even abstained from eating two of them, which were for me. One of them was a plain cake donut, which I found at least marginally palatable, but the other was coated in chocolate frosting, in which was embedded an overabundance of those unsettlingly plasticlike sticks of color called “sprinkles,” which I find to favor the eye over the tongue, so Leon obliged to eat that one as well.

“And he apologized,” continued Leon, the chocolate-and-sprinkle-coated donut making spongy squelching noises in his mouth as he chewed it, “for the sad fact that he had no painkillers to spare and for obvious reasons was not able to write you a prescription. But he said you should be taking them for the next few days or else you will probably have to endure excruciating pain.”

The pain I was in was dull and horrible, but not yet excruciating. I consumed my donut, taking tiny rabbitlike bites because I couldn’t open my mouth very wide without experiencing a burst of flames in my facial nerves, in the place where I now understood my new nose to be.

I didn’t leave the house for a week. I drank a lot of wine. From beneath some pile of rubble in the apartment Leon managed to unearth a brown plastic prescription jar of Percocet pills with a long-expired label that he said was from a past knee surgery. They did the trick. I took the Percocets and washed them down with wine, and spent much of the next few days lying with my head propped up on a mountain of pillows watching TV while floating about three feet above my body. I completely exhausted Leon’s video collection. I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, Last Tango in Paris, Annie Hall, Satyricon , and I blew through an entire boxed set of Ingmar Bergman videos that Leon had, titled Let’s Talk About Death . Leon even rented Pinocchio for me, which I watched several times in rapid succession, and it brought me joy. Leon kept me company while I convalesced, and occasionally went out to rent videos for me and to buy more donuts and wine.